Unwanted "lines" appearing...

**Drawntothemagic** · 06-19-2009, 11:10 AM

Hey all, I'm in Quality at our hospital here in Wisconsin. I do a lot of data entry and make a lot of excel spreadsheets etc. My co-worker and I recently ran into a small problem when making a quarterly chart. All looked fine, but when we printed the chart...some thick "lines" were appearing on top of the neat, orderly excel lines. The lines appear to be objects, when clicked on they can be deleted. But we don't know where they came from. They make the page look...well a little cluttered or messy when printed. I attached a small clip of a scan of the spreadsheet. We blocked the data out...sorry its slanted, the scanner made an error. Anyways, please advise on how to prevent and eliminate these lines! Thanks

**Palmetto** · 07-10-2009, 09:42 PM

The image doesn't really help much.
It would be best to upload a copy of the workbook with the chart. Be sure to remove any sensitive data.

**oldchippy** · 07-11-2009, 05:55 AM

Hi,

It looks like they are lines from small boxes used in columns that have been deleted.

When you delete columns with boxes the columns disappear but you are left with "squashed" boxes, if you click on them you can delete them. Then save you file, next time you open the file they shouldn't be there any longer.

**JBeaucaire** · 07-11-2009, 06:45 AM

I've run into this over and over through the years. It really tanked me to have to sit there and manually try to find these semi-visible objects...and some are completely invisible to the eye at all.

A colleague pointed out a simple way to get all the objects in a range, a tip I appreciate and pass on.

1) Turn on the DRAWING Toolbar
2) Click on the Select Object icon (looks like a white arrow)
3) Now draw a selection box around a section of your sheet being careful to NOT overlap objects you want to keep.
4) All the objects in the selection area are now highlighted
5) Press the Delete key.